There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)

As a reminder, it’s often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.

Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).

If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.

Well, if you ignore the chronological problems, apparently an all-ages version was released by Typemoon in 2007 (Fate/stay night Réalta Nua).

(More generally, visual novels don't necessarily contain that much porn - comparable to what you can find in regular novels. I'm fairly sure there were many more porn scenes in the books I was reading at 11, like Piers Anthony's Bio of a Space Tyrant.)

According to canon, the original PlayStation was available in 1993. So if certain electronic media are available earlier in the MoR universe, it's only a slight embellishment of an existing canon discrepancy.

You can always imagine that in the HPMoR fictional universe, Fate/Stay Night came out in some form much earlier -- same way that variations of 'Gargoyles' and "Death Note" seem to have been wizardly entertainment earlier than their real counterparts came out in the real world....

Anyway, it's not really useful to fuss about the chronology of fictional references too much, either from the point of view of the readers, nor from the point of view of the author...

Personally, I find shout-outs less jarring than straight out references to Harry having consumed fiction that shouldn't exist yet. The Tragedy of Light isn't Death Note, it's The Tragedy of Light, even if the real life inspiration is obviously Death Note.

Those are very valid objections, but since the phrase "great works of literature like Hamlet or Fate/Stay Night" constantly causes hilarious overreactions whenever I link Three Worlds Collide around, I'm entirely supportive of Eliezer taking liberties for this purpose.

Eliezer has said that he's giving a pass to any science in the story, but I don't think he's applied that policy to all fiction Harry has consumed. In the Azkaban break, Eliezer noted that Harry was quoting from the trailer of a movie (Army of Darkness,) which hadn't been released yet, and in the tvtropes discussion thread, he attested that he had checked the chronology of the trailer.

I had forgotten about the vow to Draco. Maybe that was some of Harry's anger at Dumbledore in the previous chapter - not just denial of what Dumbledore may have done, but denial of what he might do about it.

Why should the time of an ominous decision be so relevant to seers? Even if the consequences of the decision have a big impact on the future, that future already was the future. It's not like there is a default future before you make your decision and a different future afterwards, your decision itself would already be a part of the future of any earlier point in time. From a many worlds perspective you might have several different possible futures so your overall prospect of the future might significantly change after an important branching, but Harry's decision doesn't seem particularly influenced by recent random chance; it seems unlikely that from the perspective of 6 hours ago most future Harrys would make a completely different decision.

Eliezer seems to be taking a page from Alicorn's book. In Luminosity Alice is plagued by differing visions as Bella constantly changes her mind about her future, and then the actual future snaps into place when a final choice is made.

Essentially? It has to happen at some point along the timeline, and whatever engine runs magic finds it simplest to give visions simultaneous to the decisions that cause them. (Or at least, contribute in some major way to them.)

Secondary source: I have seen the first 3 films, and Alice explicitly (and repeatedly, I think) states that "a decision has been made" when she has a vision. That decision needn't be made by Bella specifically though.

If you assume both free will and prescience, it's natural. You cannot see the consequences of a decision that has not yet been made, but once it has been, then you can view it. Think of the visions in Dune, as one of the better-known examples - the visions that the seers see are infinite branches, not single facts, and the branch points are their decisions. (The analogy is not perfect - in Dune, the decisions of non-seers are taken as given - but I hope the idea is clear).

You mean libertarian free will, which already doesn't make sense all by itself, and even then the combination doesn't make sense for additional reasons, starting with that seeing anything would usually require that only main characters have free will.

I had understood the intention of the free will solution here to be normalizing: i.e. we should end with the result that we have free will in every sense that's important to us. In other words, we can make decisions from our own character and reasoning, we are responsible for those decisions, etc. etc.

If all that's true, if free will is no less important and meaningful for all the findings of natural science, then why wouldn't it likewise be important for seers and prophecy?

Free will as opposing "determinism" is a confused concept according to Eliezer's opinion, and also according to mine -- see Thou Art Physics

Basic points is that we're part of the physical world-- if free will means anything, it must mean the ability of our current physical state to determine our decisions. "Libertarian free-will" in the sense of people making decision that can't be predicted from the current state; that's inevitably just randomness, not anything that has to do with people's character traits or moralities or cognitive-processes -- nothing that is traditionally labelled "free will".

But the Potterverse is dualist. Even if horcruxes get some massive retcon, animagi preserve that in MOR.

So maybe souls are immune to the normal patterns of time and causality, and a decision from the soul has special properties for prophecy. Only when all involved souls have chosen does the timestream become fixed enough for prophecies. I'm not sure what that means for time turners. Maybe people who have gone back are out of contact with their souls.

This would cost the story applicability, but it is a story, not a treatise.

Hmm. On first reading, I just took the premonitions as being an indicator of how close we are to the apocalypse, not necessarily being caused by Harry's resolution. And yet you're right; both the premonitions we've seen so far immediately followed Harry's resolving something.

The first resolution was Harry saying that he would destroy Azkaban, whether it meant ruling Britain or summoning arcane magics to blow the building up, and that those who support Azkaban are the villains.

This resolution was Harry saying that if his war caused a single death, he would start killing villains as fast as possible.

So if these are all related, I guess all Quirrell needs to do is make Harry remember both those resolutions after someone dies and while he's in his Dark Side, and then sit back and watch as Harry exterminates 90% of the British population.

Well, no, if we're using the trial votes as the gauge, it's probably like 70/30? Maybe? But I was thinking of not only those who would sentence Hermione to Azkaban, but all those who support Azkaban in general, which is surely a significantly higher percentage.

I wasn't referring to the actual vote, but rather to the reaction to Harry's speech.

Some of the members of the Wizengamot were looking abashed at the Boy-Who-Lived's admonition, and a few others were nodding violently to the old wizard's words. But they were too few. Harry could see it. They were too few.

And that's just those who agree that Children shouldn't be exposed to dementors, and it seems to be like it's <20%. It's probably only around .1% of the population who don't want anyone of any age given to the Dead Things.

The clock is a gift from Dumbledore. On the one hand, it could be recording. On the other hand it could be transmitting. On the gripping hand, Dumbledore has a Time Turner.

If Dumbledore wanted to assure that any time he was the best pressure-release for a prophesy that pressure was released as easily and discretely as possible and less likely to be overheard, he would want to make it easy for the Prophesy Force to get that information to him.

So he gives her a clock and tells her to ask it for the time each time she wakes up in the middle of the night. The clock tells Dumbledore. Dumbledore gets invisible. Then it's just a jump to the left and he receives any prophesy intended for him.

I meant, if whenever she queries the clock for the time, Dumbledore will have arrived already, then there was no need for him to enchant the clock further to respond to the query - he could just answer it himself, since he's already there.

That might explain the first sentence of Albus Dumbledore's aftermath in Chapter 63: "It might have been only fifty-seven seconds before breakfast ended and he might have needed four twists of his Time-Turner, but in the end, Albus Dumbledore did make it."

Or perhaps not, since there would presumably be more than 4 hours between 2am (when Trelawny heard the prophecy) and the end of breakfast.

It occurred to me that I didn't notice a prior omnious resolution each time Sybil Trelowney makes a prediction. Mayhaps some resolutions happened off-stage. It might be interesting to try and guess what resolution could have triggered each prediction?

Andromeda is not the closest galaxy. The closest currently known galaxy is the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy but this wasn't known until after the story took place. However, others were known at about this time such as the Large Magellanic Cloud which is only visible from the Southern Hemisphere but has been known for centuries, or Draco Dwarf which you can see with a good telescope in the Northern Hemisphere. Andromeda is however the only one that is easily visible and very large in the Northern Hemisphere.

There are size/shape distinctions but they are all galaxies. There are issues with spiral/blob issues although in the last few years the discovery of a lot of smaller dwarf galaxies have raised issues with the standard classification. Unfortunately, I don't know anything about this in detail. Size issues may be relevant in that LGM is much smaller than Andromeda (by a factor of around 100).

The introspective morality-dump chapters are not my favorites (eg. I find the 'imagine distant descendants' to be entirely useless intuitively, and would prefer versions of the update-now argument which are more like 'decide now how you would update your beliefs based on predictions you make now failing or succeeding, since once they actually fail or succeed you'll be embarrassed & biased'), but oh well let's begin analysis.

A year ago, Dad had gone to the Australian National University in Canberra for a conference where he'd been an invited speaker, and he'd taken Mum and Harry along. And they'd all visited the National Museum of Australia, because, it had turned out, there was basically nothing else to do in Canberra. The glass display cases had shown rock-throwers crafted by the Australian aborigines - like giant wooden shoehorns, they'd looked, but smoothed and carved and ornamented with the most painstaking care. In the 40,000 years since anatomically modern humans had migrated to Australia from Asia, nobody had invented the bow-and-arrow. It really made you appreciate how non-obvious was the idea of Progress. Why would you even think of Invention as something important, if all your history's heroic tales were of great warriors and defenders instead of Thomas Edison? How could anyone possibly have suspected, while carving a rock-thrower with painstaking care, that someday human beings would invent rocket ships and nuclear energy?

This is actually a pretty bad example. The Australians and New Guineans etc. were not necessarily incompetent (witness the boomerang, or the independent invention of the blow-gun), and specifically, throwing-sticks (atlatl) are really fearsome weapons which can throw darts or rocks insane distances more comparable to English longbows than anything else. Throwing sticks for spears were in military use in ancient Greece or Egypt, areas which always had bows-and-arrows.

A better example would be Tasmania and technology it lost, like making fire.

In a land where Muggleborns received no letters of any kind

This would seem to indicate Harry over-estimated the magnitude of his inference in the early chapters about the implication of so few Muggleborns at Hogwarts, but immediately raises the question of what do those lands do with their Muggleborns.

Finally:

She came awake with a gasp of horror, she woke with an unvoiced scream on her lips and no words came forth

Sybil is now definitely the bearer of at least one unvoiced prophecy, and if I'm counting right, at least two - she woke up without speaking in some earlier chapter as well.

While it is clear that the Tasmanian aborigines did lose a lot of technological know-how, there's some dispute over whether they actually lost fire. Unfortunately, I don't have a great source for this. The claim is sourced in the relevant Wikipedia article, but the citation is to a dead-link.

Hmm, reading your argument there I'm convinced. The tertiary nature of the sources claiming they had fire-making, combined with the well-documented preservation of fires are both pretty strong arguments.

This is the same instance, it's word for word the same as her previous nightmare, this chapter just continues it a little farther and shows that there are people all over the globe who are also having visions of bad things to come.

That's weird. So is the first instance supposed to be a massive flashforward (despite no one ever noticing this before because it was written as present tense), or is this second instance supposed to be a big flashback (despite being written as though it happens after Harry finishes his soliloquy)? Maybe Eliezer deliberately or accidentally just made it very similar.

As the CS saying goes, things happen 0, 1, or indefinitely many times. Why does this Sybil failure happen only twice (as opposed to every night, the prophecy not having gone off on a vacation or anything), and why is it linked with additional characters who were not also linked to the previous incident?

I don't think we should assume that. The end of 85 reads to me like a flailing optimization process that can't 'find' a natural route to changing Harry's future and is pushing absurdly improbable routes.

This would seem to indicate Harry over-estimated the magnitude of his inference in the early chapters about the implication of so few Muggleborns at Hogwarts, but immediately raises the question of what do those lands do with their Muggleborns.

If you knew that a woman in your village was communing via socially unapproved rituals with a transhuman intelligence of unknown nature and preferences, would you convince your village to burn her to death? Ideally you'd just use the Object Class: Roko Containment Protocol, but then her own soul remains at risk—burning her alive at least gives her strong incentive to repent.

If you knew that a woman in your village was communing via socially unapproved rituals with a transhuman intelligence of unknown nature and preferences, would you convince your village to burn her to death?

Hrm. Less content than I hoped for, given how long we get to wait for more. Still, sounds like Harry just grew up a whole lot that night, and he made a pretty okay decision(even if it will inevitably bite him in the ass later on, narrativium being what it is).

Ah, a chance to use a simple heuristic - if I see 3^^^3 in a philosophical question, terminate thought and respond with profanity. It's the simplest accurate algorithm for responding to such questions, I've found.

Ah, a chance to use a simple heuristic - if I see 3^^^3 in a philosophical question, terminate thought and respond with profanity. It's the simplest accurate algorithm for responding to such questions, I've found.

Please don't do that (in a way that is in any way visible on this forum). If you can't keep your inability handle extreme cases to yourself then please leave.

No, said all the voices in Harry's mind that seized the moment to speak. Even his dark side, if it had a different opinion, remained silent. His dark side hadn't asked anything of him in exchange for saving Hermione, either. Maybe because his dark side wasn't an imaginary voice like Hufflepuff; Harry might imagine his Hufflepuff part as wanting different things from himself, but his dark side wasn't like that. His "dark side", so far as Harry could tell, was a different way that Harry sometimes was. Right now, Harry wasn't angry; and trying to ask what "dark Harry" wanted was a phone ringing unanswered. The thought even seemed a little strange; could you owe something to a different way you sometimes were?

Means that the dark side is the Voldemort soul and that Harry is a Horcrux.

EY is very helpful with clarification and fixing our broken theories, sometimes.

EDIT: What the hell with the random neg reps, seriously. This site actually has worse and stronger and more irrational groupthinking than other sites I visit. This is bizarre and unhealthy, I think I might not comment on here anymore, although I'm not really sure yet because the quality of the actual posts is much better although the comments are worse.

But good luck trying to make the public like rationalists. I'm sure you guys will do great.
[/sarcasm]

I think the downvotes come from you making a claim about the quoted text that doesn't seem particularly well supported. I would think that what you quoted is evidence against his dark side being Voldemort (since it emphasizes that they aren't really separate entities, just separate mind states), though I do think Harry is a Horcrux.

I think your edit is a bit annoying in tone. (Complaining about downvotes and groupthink + only having -1 karma + calling the site bizarre and unhealthy + unnecessary sarcasm)

So all of the above are obvious rationalizations and are also pathetic.

Alsadius asserts that I'm overconfident and that I'm not thinking very clearly. That only makes sense if my comment is wrong, and he gave no reasons my comment was wrong. EY is clearly mirroring the language which I used in a previous comment, that's why he specifically mentions Hufflepuff and distinguishes between Hufflepuff and the dark side, which is exactly what I was asking other commenters to do. Apparently he thought my previous belief was at least somewhat justifiable and worth addressing. I thought that was cool.

ArisKatsaris tries to pose as the neutral and objective Voice of Polite Reason by not downvoting me. He sides himself with "the community" so it's "him and them" against "me". He says I shouldn't have attacked the entire community because my low reputation is a result of specific individuals who dislike what I'm saying and not the fault of LessWrong as a whole. This is wrong because the LessWrong community is nothing more than the sum of these individuals, and when multiple individuals -karma me and no one +karmas it shows that the community does not approve of me. Obviously I'm not criticizing literally each and every one of the people who visit this site, but I am criticizing the people who are going after me. Additionally, if there are parts of the community sympathetic to what I'm saying who aren't speaking up, it makes sense to talk about groupthink. Since no one has commented in my favor, everyone in the community is either against me or is complicit in the problems I criticize. (If you (yes you, generic reader) find that the fact that everyone is criticizing me persuades you to criticize me, you know much less about fallacies than you think you do. Don't fall into the evil pit of stupid, it's not safe in there.)

He is correct to say that I would get more reputation if I did not challenge the community for being stupid groupthinkers, but that is obvious, I already knew that. My goal isn't to get good karma, it's to get a few of people who are reading this to realize how stupid the commenters here are behaving. Ideally EY would come out and tell all of you that you're being stupid, but that's utopian and doesn't seem probable.

Ahartell says my comment sounded annoying, I would rather that it sounded annoyed but it probably does sound annoying. Ahartell's assertion that the text doesn't match is probably based on a misinterpretation of this: "His "dark side", so far as Harry could tell, was a different way that Harry sometimes was" as though it means that his dark side is just a mood. But it's not a mood, it's been clearly characterized in past chapters. Reread the quotation, literally nothing within it even suggests that the dark side is not Voldemort's soul, it just seems artificially similar to that upon a careless first glance (I know because I made the same careless first glance). EY can't have Harry come right out and say "Oh yeah, that must be someone else's soul" so this is as close as he can get to correcting my earlier comment. The parallels between that earlier comment and the text I quoted are obvious.

If I have misguessed what Ahartell's position is, that is his own fault because he never actually made a warranted argument supporting his interpretation, he just asserted his interpretation and forced me to defend against whatever I perceived as the most probable reasons he would come to the position that he did. Ahartell, clarification would probably be appreciated.

Additionally, I reject (his?) claim that "the downvotes come from you making a claim about the quoted text that doesn't seem particularly well supported". -6 doesn't happen as a result of a factual mistake, nor does +9 for a clever rationalization; both happen as a result of dislike for me as a person and because of social influences and not as a result of a flawed claim. The intensity of reactions to my posts got much stronger as it became apparent that rejecting my arguments was the hip new trend that all the cool kids were doing.

My above comment was intended to make EY happy that I saw what he did there, so that he knows that he was being effective with this passage. Instead he'll probably just be upset about the stupidity of his fans who don't recognize truth when it's obvious.

Ironically I was earlier criticized for arguing that the dark side wasn't Voldemort's soul. Apparently I'm damned whether I do or don't.

Also, I've decided that I'm sticking around until the issues I have with the commenters on this site are resolved to my satisfaction. I think it's worth spending a few last minutes of time trying to convince the silent lurkers that I'm sure are out there somewhere that the commenters on this site are not all that hot. This last point is intended to qualify my earlier remarks about leaving so that it becomes apparent that there is no contradiction and that I do intend to leave.

Okay, seriously, how strong do you think the groupthink effect could possibly be on the question of whether Harry's dark side is a piece of Voldemort's soul in HPMOR? For the record I think you were probably downvoted for claiming that something was "clearly" implied when I (and so presumably others) can't see how it's implied at all (and I still can't see it, having read the comment which is apparently supposed to make it clear, and which wasn't, incidentally, linked to in the great-grandparent), and then downvoted further when you decided to insult everyone.

Yeah, that was one of my points. I'm saying that it's people backing each others opinions mostly because they don't like me and because they are members of the same group. They're even attacking totally legitimate comments I'm making that have zero problems whatsoever. My point is that the objections to my above comment, and my comments in general, aren't based on a rational rejection of my arguments, as ahartell tried to say.

I don't want to insult everyone, I want to insult the people who are attacking me without warrant or who are attacking me in retaliation to my criticism. I also think I already explained about how addressing my concerns at "the community" makes sense.

Also, I have no idea how you're failing to understand how the comment supports what I'm saying.

I said: "Why do you think the dark side is any more separate from Harry than Hufflepuff?"

EY said: "His dark side wasn't an imaginary voice like Hufflepuff".

If you can't understand that those are similar then I don't know how to convince you of anything.

Oh, I see your argument now (not that I think it's decisive enough to make you interpretation "clearly" the correct one, but, you know, whatever) - notice though that there was no way I could have guessed it from the great^3-grandparent. I would have said that's why you were downvoted initially, but looking through your comment history it's quite possible there is someone automatically downvoting your comments regardless of content, in which case I really don't know what to tell you. Sorry about that.

At this point I wouldn't be surprised if there existed at least one person who did follow chaosmosis around to downvote everything he said. I strongly disapprove of this being done, but it's the inevitable conclusion when someone chooses to spew insults on other people en masse.

This is what motivated the insults in the first place, you've got the chain of causality backwards.

Or there's a feedback loop, where someone downvotes you, you then insult people, then more people downvote you for the insults, then you insult people some more for those downvotes, which causes even more people to downvote you... and so forth.

I expect this is partially true but this isn't what I'm concerned with.

I'm concerned with the people for whom this is false, the people who are -repping everything I write. I'm also concerned with the people who are specifically targeting my posts and following me around and criticizing everything I write, and the fact that there's half a dozen people who are plus repping everyone who says anything which doesn't agree with my position, and that I have to argue against so many different people to support a theory that I think is pretty straightforward and is probably true.

You seem to currently have exactly one downvoted comment outside the HPMOR discussion and that at only -1. What makes you think the effects you see aren't simply a result of people actively participating in these threads noticing and responding to comments they deem poorly supported? No following around required.

As for the downvotes, I suspect an overwelming majority of them result from your adversarial reactions to criticism, not the HPMOR content. How many downvotes had this received before you added this edit?

What the hell with the random neg reps, seriously. This site actually has worse and stronger and more irrational groupthinking than other sites I visit. This is bizarre and unhealthy, I think I might not comment on here anymore, although I'm not really sure yet because the quality of the actual posts is much better although the comments are worse.

Trying to articulate what I meant by karma sink and I don't really have a coherent notion of the statement. I think I meant something like a single comment leading to massive downvotes, but when stated that way it doesn't seem to be that bad.

I do that too, but have only downvoted maybe 2 or 3 of chaosmosis's comments (he's nor particularly trollish or obnoxious, just a bit rude and obstinate; I don't know (or care) what the original disagreement on HPMoR was).

It's fairly likely that a particularly stupid or rude comment in the recent comments can trigger many people independently doing "mild karmassissanation" (checking the user's recent comments, and downvoting a couple stupid posts), giving an overall impression of systematic downvoting.

At this point I wouldn't be surprised if there existed at least one person who did follow chaosmosis around to downvote everything he said. I strongly disapprove of this being done, but it's the inevitable conclusion when someone chooses to spew insults on other people en masse.

Really doesn't seem worth it. He's just a Mostly Harmless kid who is bungling his way through learning how power works. There isn't much harm he could do even if he tried. I focus my specific moderating attention on cases that do real damage to serious conversations (which usually means straw man power user debaters.)

I already stated my original goal, and I already stated that it's now probably unachievable.

My above comment was intended to make EY happy that I saw what he did there, so that he knows that he was being effective with this passage. Instead he'll probably just be upset about the stupidity of his fans who don't recognize truth when it's obvious.

I endorse the goal of getting someone to believe that I'm not wrong, because the above goal is probably unachievable.

So all of the above are obvious rationalizations and are also pathetic.

This is at least rude. Downvoted without having to read more. Learn about the principle of charity.

obvous

Illusion of transparency.

pathetic

Unnecessarily insulting. What do you mean on the object-level, and how could you say it in a way that is not rude?

Alsadius asserts that I'm overconfident and that I'm not thinking very clearly. That only makes sense if my comment is wrong

No. You can have true conclusions from a fallacious argument or false premises, or true beliefs following from faulty reasoning. And for example, precisely 100% is overconfident that the sun will rise tomorrow, even if it turns out to be correct.

Obviously I'm not criticizing literally each and every one of the people who visit this site,

Again, illusion of transparency. If you say the community, and the community means "the sum of [all] the individuals" here, then it is not obvious that you do not mean "each and every one of the people who visit this site".

it makes sense to talk about groupthink

'Groupthink' is a highly technical term, and shouldn't be bandied about. If you're going to assert that without any evidence that it's accurate, then I'm forced to assume that, like most usage of that term, it's shorthand for "people disagree with me".

If you (yes you, generic reader) find that the fact that everyone is criticizing me persuades you to criticize me, you know much less about fallacies than you think you do.

I don't see what fallacies could possibly have to do with that; criticism is a behavior, not an argument or conclusion. And I don't see how that follows, even if it did make sense - I don't expect a generic reader to know much about fallacies, so I don't see how that should necessarily indicate they know less about them.

Additionally, I reject (his?) claim that "the downvotes come from you making a claim about the quoted text that doesn't seem particularly well supported". -6 doesn't happen as a result of a factual mistake, nor does +9 for a clever rationalization; both happen as a result of dislike for me as a person and because of social influences and not as a result of a flawed claim. The intensity of reactions to my posts got much stronger as it became apparent that rejecting my arguments was the hip new trend that all the cool kids were doing.

As far as I can tell, the large numbers of downvotes started rolling in when you started being rude. That's why I downvoted. And overconfidence is not a mere factual mistake, it's an error in reasoning, which is much more damning of a comment's quality.

a result of dislike for me as a person

I was not under the impression anyone here knows you. Really, try not to take downvotes personally, they just mean your comments are really bad.

The parallels between that earlier comment and the text I quoted are obvious.

you keep using that word.

Ironically I was earlier criticized for arguing that the dark side wasn't Voldemort's soul. Apparently I'm damned whether I do or don't.

I don't think I need to be polite when I'm having everything I write be downvoted and "argued" against by about twelve different people. I'm pretty obviously being treated as a hostile, here, and there's no reason I would want to be polite with people who see no problem being rude to me.

"Pathetic" is vague. I mean that the posters should be ashamed if they actually the counterarguments that they wrote because those counterarguments are very weak. They only appear strong if you read them without critically reflecting on what they're actually saying, or on the implicit assumptions they are making.

By "groupthink" I mean that people are disagreeing with me simply because other people are disagreeing with me and because I already have negative karma. I also mean that they aren't considering my arguments fairly, they're only looking at the issue from a one sided perspective. I'm pretty sure that this is a standard interpretation of what "groupthink" means.

I think I do overuse the word obviously. But the parallels specifically really are obvious.

Substance

Again, illusion of transparency. If you say the community, and the community means "the sum of [all] the individuals" here, then it is not obvious that you do not mean "each and every one of the people who visit this site".

You're playing with semantics and taking quotes literally. I don't think it makes much sense to act as though I think every person on LessWrong is an asshole. I think if you were using the principle of charity you would realize that my comments aren't addressed at everyone on the site. You're willfully being confused here.

No. You can have true conclusions from a fallacious argument or false premises, or true beliefs following from faulty reasoning. And for example, precisely 100% is overconfident that the sun will rise tomorrow, even if it turns out to be correct.

I understand this principle. I wasn't arguing that I'm immune to criticism because I was correct in my conclusion. I was arguing that I shouldn't be criticized because my reasoning process was objectively correct. Nothing that you said here is relevant to what I was contending.

I don't see what fallacies could possibly have to do with that; criticism is a behavior, not an argument or conclusion. And I don't see how that follows, even if it did make sense - I don't expect a generic reader to know much about fallacies, so I don't see how that should necessarily indicate they know less about them.

It is easier to reject a viewpoint if other people do not find that viewpoint credible. Like how all of America hates communism but very few can give substantive arguments as to why it is bad (not that I want to defend communism). It is "common sense" in America that communism is bad. When people hear someone or something being criticized, that makes it easier for them to think of reasons that the thing is bad or wrong and it makes it harder for them to think of how that thing might be good.

As far as I can tell, the large numbers of downvotes started rolling in when you started being rude. That's why I downvoted. And overconfidence is not a mere factual mistake, it's an error in reasoning, which is much more damning of a comment's quality.

No, I started receiving lots of bad karma after a post I made in the earlier thread, and that trend spread to here. I didn't just spontaneously start being rude, I was rude as a result of the way my comments have been received generally. I've received about -30 karma in the last twelve hours, that's not warranted and it justifies a response, even if that response is angry.

I was not under the impression anyone here knows you. Really, try not to take downvotes personally, they just mean your comments are really bad.

Perhaps personally was the wrong word, but there are people going around downvoting everything I write simply because I am the one who wrote it. That is stupid. That makes me want to leave this site. That is bad for rationality. It's also bad because it is mean.

I don't think I need to be polite when I'm having everything I write be downvoted and "argued" against by about twelve different people.

Neither of these gives a licence for rudeness. Having a variety of people argue against a position is not a reason that defense of that position should be less polite. As to downvoting- you yourself said that people should care less about downvoting, so maybe do so?

In general, you need to think carefully about what your goals are. If your goals are to convince people then being polite helps. If your goal is to convince bystanders of your position or something similar then being polite still helps, because people are more inclined to take a position seriously when the one arguing for it is calm and polite. At a completely selfish level, being rude makes it harder to accept that one is wrong, due to cognitive dissonance issues and invested-effort/sunk cost issues. So if one wants to become less wrong one should try to be polite for purely selfish reasons.

I've always hated (not really but I've always disliked) people who take pains to be polite in discourse for the same reasons that I dislike people who take pains to frame themselves as victims. That's actually why I capitalize mocked "The Voice of Polite Reason" above.

Manners are almost always used as a ploy for power. Manners hinder productive conversation and allow for framing techniques that automatically give certain positions more weight than others. I've never had a productive conversation in which I did not speak frankly. I feel basically the same way about manners as Nietzsche did about all of morality, upon reflection. Neato.

I care about downvoting because it reflects widespread ignorance and most people here seem to not recognize the ignorance. It sort of legitimizes the ignorance, as well, which would result in discarding a good theory which was not in my interests because I wanted to discuss the theory because I wanted to predict what would happen next. I never said that I think people should care less about receiving downvoting, I said that people should give out downvotes with less intensity and frequency.

If anything, there should be less rudeness and more downvoting on this site. For this community, rude disagreement and lack of downvoting would still be the default if we weren't actively suppressing it.

Politeness is useful. Rudeness is the way to mind-killing. If you don't want people to engage with your ideas rationally, be rude to them - that strategy works very well on humans.

Rudeness makes sense insofar as agents respond irrationally to claims that are addressed at them, I understand that claim although I wish it wasn't true and I still prefer frankness to politeness, and I still don't trust calls to "be polite".

Additionally, I want a way to express frustration when I'm dealing with stupid things.

But most of the downvoting on this site seems to be a death spiral or a happy spiral. There are a disproportionate number of comments with +10 or -5 karma on this site, some of EY's comments get like +50 which isn't justified no matter how good the comment. That's like the worth of an entire well done article. Why more downvoting?

Justification for voting applies to whether one clicks the "vote up" or "vote down" button. Ideally, this is done without reference to a comment's current score. +50 just means that 50 of the readers (on net) thought it was upvote-worthy, and there are many more than 50 readers of the site.

That's like the worth of an entire well done article.

FWIW, votes on articles (in main) are worth 10x the karma.

Why more downvoting?

Downvoting is our method of curation. It hides bad comments from casual readers. Curation is important because otherwise everything devolves into Reddit. See this post by Jeff Atwood.

In my opinion, roughly 1/3 of all comments you read should be downvoted. Sadly, that is not feasible in practice due to downvote limits. Others think that policy is too 'harsh', but are free to use a different algorithm for voting.

This community appears to value politeness over rudeness (I know I do). If you don't like that norm, you can find another community, or attempt to convince us that the norm is useless and we should stop enforcing it. Flouting the norm and being rude will just attract hostility.

Ok, you don't care about rudeness? You are being a fucking moron. You are deliberately being an aggressive dick and you're surprised that these comments get downvoted? I don't like people whining about being downvoted and if they CONTINUE to make stupid threads about how they shouldn't be downvoted then they are even more annoying. You threatened to leave earlier. Please get the hell out.

I care about downvoting because it reflects widespread ignorance and most people here seem to not recognize the ignorance.

You are wrong. I haven't followed closely enough to know whether the other guy was right but your own behavior in your comments is more than sufficient to get downvoted according to local norms - and you'd be shunned or shamed in most social environments where you tried to pull this crap.

there's no reason I would want to be polite with people who see no problem being rude to me.

Then expect to be downvoted - anyone else being rude to you will be downvoted as well (not necessarily on net).

By "groupthink" I mean that people are disagreeing with me simply because other people are disagreeing with me and because I already have negative karma. I also mean that they aren't considering my arguments fairly, they're only looking at the issue from a one sided perspectively. I'm pretty sure that this is a standard interpretation of what "groupthink" means.

Leaving aside the common "people are disagreeing with me" interpretation, I still don't think that's what people (non-technically) mean when they use the word "groupthink". "Groupthink" (in the popular usage) implies that there are beliefs common to the group that are not questioned - for example, accusing Less Wrong of "groupthink" because a comment against cryonics was highly criticized would be the common usage.

Really, it should not be used that way either though, since it's too similar to the technical meaning of the term but entirely wrong.

No, I was not confused about what you meant - I was pointing out how it was not obvious. If you say "Obviously X" and I think X is also obvious to me, then I still might have grounds for arguing that X is not obvious in general. In fact, unless you're talking about something like the color of an object that a particular group of people are currently staring at, it's best to assume that nothing is obvious. If you do use the word "obvious", you should expect objections from people who did not find it obvious, and expect some of them to feel that you are insulting their intelligence.

I do not see how I was playing with semantics. Yes, I take what you write literally. If you do not want me to read the words that you write, then do not write them on this website, as I will probably get around to reading all of them eventually.

Nothing that you said here is relevant to what I was contending.

Usually, "if my comment was wrong" refers to its factual accuracy, not the quality of your reasoning. So following an accusation of overconfidence with "that would only make sense if my comment was wrong" is misleading.

It is easier to reject a viewpoint if other people do not find that viewpoint credible....

I'm familiar with that effect, but I don't see how it's a response to either of my statements.

No, I started receiving lots of bad karma after a post I made in the earlier thread, and that trend spread to here.

Well I, for one, did not read or downvote anything you said in that other thread until I read this one. Now I've gone back and downvoted all the low-quality comments you made in that thread (note: that is not all of your comments).

there are people going around downvoting everything I write simply because I am the one who wrote it. That is stupid.

There are more constructive things to call that behavior other than "stupid". And I'd like to know how you know that's what people are doing - I have no tools that let me detect that, and looking back at your comment history you have some recent comments that are not at a net negative.

I'm done protecting the theory. I don't have the time to argue with this many different people.

If I haven't convinced you yet then it's either impossible because I'm wrong or impossible because you don't want to understand or you're lying. I don't much care either way, because I don't believe that any reasonable observer would conclude that the remaining objections to what I've been saying are actually important. I believe that I've done enough to convince someone who is actually interested in knowing what happened, and that I can never convince anyone if the amount of work I've done so far isn't enough.

You've been willfully ignorant and willfully misinterpreted me, and your disdain for debate and your rejection of "convincing" because it's apparently associated with debate is incredibly stupid. You are acting like an idiot. If convincing shouldn't be my primary goal, then I should stop this conversation. Your own "objection" would support my point if you thought through what you were saying and what I said. You're clearly not concerned with doing that, however. The fact that I'm dealing with so many people who don't bother to answer their own questions or to consider arguments before making them is the very reason that I won't be wasting anymore time on defending my theory. You obviously aren't interested in predicting what will or what has happened so much as you are interested in attacking me, hence the useless comment you just made.

Either you are being irrational or Aumann is wrong, given his qualifications and your above fallacies I would bet it's the former. Please stop being stupid.

Aumann's Agreement Theorem only applies to perfectly rational agents in particular idealized circumstances, as much as it's used colloquially hereabouts as though it says anything about humans.

And yes, I'm being massively irrational. I am a human. You are also being massively irrational. If you have figured out how to stop doing that, then please let us know.

your above fallacies

I did not see any fallacies. Given that I am an expert on logic, I expect that you're just using the word wrong.

your disdain for debate and your rejection of "convincing" because it's apparently associated with debate is incredibly stupid.

I'm still unsure what you mean by "stupid" on the object level.

For humans, being in debate-mode tends to be a bad idea with respect to truth-seeking. Once you start arguing for a position, it is very difficult to update your beliefs on new evidence.

If you have evidence, state your evidence, update on the evidence presented by others, and everybody wins. Entering into debate-mode or being rude is a great way to discourage rationality in both yourself and any respondents.

I don't think I need to be polite when I'm having everything I write be downvoted and "argued" against by about twelve different people.

Consider the case where some mugger is pointing a gun at you. That should help give you a more practical perspective. Sure, the mugger doesn't deserve politeness. It isn't fair that politeness is necessary. But you still need to be polite to him if you wish to minimize the chance that he will shoot you in the head.

Sometimes other people really do behaving like dicks and be unreasonable or unfair. Yet that doesn't mean you are obliged to sabotage yourself to get petty vengeance. You are free to follow whatever course of actions get you the best outcome. So what if that course happens to involve typing words that will cause other people to believe you are being polite to them? What matters is whether you get what you want in the end.

I am not downvoting this comment of yours, but here's a piece of advice: attacking the whole forum over a single downvote is probably the best way to ensure you'll get more downvotes.

If you want to get fewer downvotes, best way possible is to complain less about the occasional downvotes you will get. All that a downvote means is that one person out of the hundreds that visit the site didn't like your comment. But when you attack a whole community over what a single member of it did, well... that'll cause more people to think that such an attack merits a few more downvotes.

Just by reading your comment before the Edits, I thought that you're probably correct, Harry seems confused about his dark side and that (to me) also seems to be Bayesian evidence for Harry being at least partially a horcrux. So to me, it seems like you're qualitatively right, although the importance of this piece of evidence can be discussed about. The downvotes could simply be bad luck, and I'd have expected this comment to go back at zero and beyond in a few hours.

However, posing yourself as a victim of this sites supposed groupthinking and attacking us using sarcasm makes things worse. I'm not surprised that in this form, the comment got to -6 points. These sorts of attacks (posing oneself as the victim and then vigorously attacking) are neither liked here nor in most other places, I'm afraid.

I agree that the victim model sucks. I was actively trying to distance myself from it through harsh and angry rhetoric but failed. Probably the sarcasm was the mistake that made me seem victim like. What should I do to distance myself further, since I've apparently failed? No one wants to deal with a victim which is definitely justified. At the same time, I want to complain.

My response should be viewed in context of multiple high numbers negative reputations I received on multiple posts in different discussion threads. I wouldn't have responded like that to one single instance. But I had multiple instances where good posts, just like the one above, received multiple negative reputations. I wanted to complain about that. It seems like as soon as I opposed pendanterrific on the other thread everyone started smashing on everything I said, which is stupid and justifies a response on my part.

The specific above response was flawed, although I still strongly defend its sentiment. I don't want to apologize, exactly, because I feel that being angry with the hordes of negative reputation is justified. At the same time I wish that it had been phrased differently, and that I had more specifically tailored my response to address the people swarming me with bad karma.

I apologize for that response to all people on LessWrong who did not downvote my good comments, such as (presumably) you. I do not and will not apologize to the people who downvoted my comments without any real justification, those guys are assholes. I will also not apologize to the people who are willfully misunderstanding me or who are attacking every statement I make.

Harry thought the deepest split in his personality wasn't anything to do with his dark side; rather it was the divide between the altruistic and forgiving Abstract Reasoning Harry, versus the frustrated and angry Harry In The Moment.

This as well as the distant descendants part seems to draw on Robin's near vs. far theory.

So, Mr. Potter made an ominous resolution, and again without a thunder rumbling in the background... Instead, he caused women all around the globe to see nightmares and cry... I don't remember if seers tend to be female in canon or not. I find the fact that seers, while living in different places and being of different age, are invariantly female, suspicious.

In the Forbidden Forest, a centaur woken by a nameless apprehension ceased scanning the night sky, having found only questions there and no answers; and with a folding of his many legs, Firenze went back to sleep.

Not quite. I think the point is that because we aren't perfect Bayesian reasoners, we neglect to update on some of the available evidence. But getting into the right frame of mind can help you avoid that. (Cf. the reasoning behind Harry's decision to tell McGonagall about the Parseltongue message from the sorting hat.)

The heuristic Harry is using here, is to imagine a future test he thinks would be decisive, and ask himself what outcome he expects from that test. That's a way to "unlock" and find out about your beliefs about the present.

Personally, I get very little use out of this technique, since my problem tends to be uncertainty about the likely consequences of my actions, not uncertainty about which outcome would be best.

It was abruptly very clear that while Harry was going around trying to live the ideals of the Enlightenment, Dumbledore was the one who'd actually fought in a war. Nonviolent ideals were cheap to hold if you were a scientist, living inside the Protego bubble cast by the police officers and soldiers whose actions you had the luxury to question. Albus Dumbledore seemed to have started out with ideals at least as strong as Harry's own, if not stronger; and Dumbledore hadn't gotten through his war without losing friends and killing enemies and sacrificing allies.

For commentary, we turn to Bismarck: "A fool learns from his mistakes, but a truly wise man learns from the mistakes of others."

Even if Dumbledore was right, and the true enemy was utterly mad and evil... in a hundred million years the organic lifeform known as Lord Voldemort probably wouldn't seem much different from all the other bewildered children of Ancient Earth. Whatever Lord Voldemort had done to himself, whatever Dark rituals seemed so horribly irrevocable on a merely human scale, it wouldn't be beyond curing with the technology of a hundred million years. Killing him, if you didn't have to do it, would be just one more death for future sentient beings to be sad about. How could you look up at the stars, and believe anything else?

Do Achilles and Odysseus not seem too different to modern eyes? No- one is pride and folly, and the other prudence and wisdom. But unfortunately one must be Odysseus to know that, and Harry is an Achilles.

History remembers actions; fiction remembers people. And so Harry thinks that the future will remember everyone currently alive as they are in fiction, rather than as their deeds show them to be. Indeed, once you have "cured" Voldemort by scooping out his will and past, what remains? Why does he think the future will hold life to be as precious as the present does, instead of cheap, as it did and will again in Malthusian economies?

Harry does not look at the stars; he looks at himself. He would do better to look at others.

In the 40,000 years since anatomically modern humans had migrated to Australia from Asia

BTW - this was the accepted figure as of 1991, but molecular evidence suggests 62,000-75,000 years. Which makes Harry's point even more strongly: it took a long time for humans as we know them to invent what we think of as basic stuff.

At a cursory glace the date you cite seems to be for the time the population they are descended from split from African populations, not for when they arrived in Australia. Genetic evidence cannot show where your ancestors lived, only how they were related to other populations (which might imply things about where they lived provided you already know that for the other populations)

Genetic evidence can't show where your ancestors lived, but it can gesture furtively in one direction while mouthing "look over there". Even in hunter-gatherer populations, there's enough mobility that it shouldn't take anywhere near 22,000 years for African genes to make their way to Australia (or to wherever the proto-Australians were living at the time).

Okay, after thinking a few minutes about the Batman-Joker/where do you put Dark Wizards if you're determined not to use Dementors anymore problem...

Unbreakable Vow anyone? Just give Dark Wizards the option "either you take an Unbreakable Vow to never knowingly kill/torture/Imperio a human being ever again, nor to ever knowingly assist in such, or we just execute you right now".

I can think up of possible ways out of this meta-problem, in order to sustain the dilemma: Perhaps really powerful Dark Wizards require too vast a portion of magical power to sustain the vow. Perhaps there are dark rituals whereby using them, Dark Wizards can break out of even an (ill-named) Unbreakable Vow. Perhaps Dark Wizards tend to have made other rituals that already make them immune to Unbreakable Vows... Perhaps unbreakable vows need be really really specific in some weird manner like "I will not kill Bill Weasley", and "I will not kill Charlie Weasley" necessarily are two separate vows, so that "I will not kill any human" isn't enforceable...

But these are additional problems that are not yet mentioned/listed/foreshadowed in the story. Ugh, Unbreakable Vows seem something of a game breaker right now.

Sidenote: Whenever I think of something such, I worry that the author will think he'll have to rewrite/revise everything he had already planned, and that we'll never get an update again. Not my intention, I swear.

Okay, after thinking a few minutes about the Batman-Joker/where do you put Dark Wizards if you're determined not to use Dementors anymore problem...

Kill them. With great power comes great getting-held-responsible-if-necessary.

Unbreakable Vow anyone? Just give Dark Wizards the option "either you take an Unbreakable Vow to never knowingly kill/torture/Imperio a human being ever again, nor to ever knowingly assist in such, or we just execute you right now".

Unbreakable Vows are ridiculously broken, as Harry briefly observes in Ch. 74. They're even more ridiculous in fanfictions where people can just grab a wand and swear something on their life and magic and thereby create a magically binding vow. I had to nerf the hell out of their activation costs just to make the MoR-verse keep running. I can't depict a society with zero agency problems, a perfect public commitment process and an infinite trust engine unless the whole story is about that.

Makes sense. I was confused so I looked it up:
"And the third wizard, the binder, permanently sacrifices a small portion of their own magic, to sustain the Vow forever."
I guess the self-improvement part is out of the question then...

Still; it'd be a pretty hardcore thing to do for an ambitious dying grandfather. Make his grandson, age 3, swear the vow (something along the lines: "I will never spend an awake moment on anything except improving my abilities or the situation of my family" - it could be phrased better) and then die happily.

Still; it'd be a pretty hardcore thing to do for an ambitious dying grandfather. Make his grandson, age 3, swear the vow (something along the lines: "I will never spend an awake moment on anything except improving my abilities or the situation of my family" - it could be phrased better) and then die happily.

Age three? Does the vow actually impel you adhere to it or does it just kill you when you are about to break it? (I thought the latter.) Didn't he just kill his grandson?

Thank you; I even managed to figure that out myself (with the help of our ever vigilant and watchful google); as seen in my response to Desrtopa (24 seconds before you clicked the comment button apparently).

RE: the game breaker opening example: Iron vs bronze weapons is a game breaker? Hardly. The difference in weapon quality there is minor (and even arguable). Bronze vs Steel... sure, that's a big deal but even then not worthy of 'game breaker' accolades.

Unbreakable Vow anyone? Just give Dark Wizards the option "either you take an Unbreakable Vow to never knowingly kill/torture/Imperio a human being ever again, nor to ever knowingly assist in such, or we just execute you right now".

If there exists any ritual that happens to permanently remove a portion of somebody's magic (Unbreakable Vow), then you could just repeat that ritual meaninglessly until that person was completely stripped of magic permanently. Or you could use other rituals which require similar permanent sacrifices until you achieve the same effect. Keeping a permanently magicless wizard imprisoned is a trivial task, and obviates the need for dementors.

Side Note: That's actually my pet theory on why Dementors as prison guards are acceptable to the public. It could be that governments used to use rituals to permanently strip prisoners of magic before imprisoning them. This would make them a revenue center instead of a funds sink. This would naturally encourage the magical government to find more and more excuses to imprison people, similar to how the 'tough on crime' cycle is accelerated by the for-profit prison systems in some places. A police state would be soon to follow. Then, after a cultural revolution, Dementors were adopted as the less evil option to house criminals. It also helps explain why so many rituals are banned. It's unlikely to be true in HPMoR, but it'd be a nice thought for another fanfic.

Another problem with this system is the permanence. People get sent to Azkaban for less than lifetime sentences, but if you use this to strip someone of magic it's gone forever. I suppose you could use degrees of magic removal as punishment but that seems hard to balance to different powerlevels of wizard.

I wasn't aware that was a particularly politically charged example since it's not currently on either side's discussion plate.

I do think it's somewhat relevant with them both being profit motivations that encourage increasingly stricter laws and enforcement. Then again if I'd been able to notice the problem I wouldn't have put it in there in the first place.

Taking your advice, do you think I should edit it out and remove the example? Or better yet, could anyone think of an example that's not so politically proximate that illustrates the same effect? I'd image a similar thing would occur in ancient Rome with slaves, or maybe colonial-era governments with indentured servitude, but I'm not quite as familiar with those.

Unbreakable Vow anyone? Just give Dark Wizards the option "either you take an Unbreakable Vow to never knowingly kill/torture/Imperio a human being ever again, nor to ever knowingly assist in such, or we just execute you right now".

I don't think it would be that easy. This is isomorphic to making wishes with an evil genie--or coding a human-level AI with a list of deontological commands. It could be done, but probably not in an EY fanfic and probably not without a skilled magical lawyer.

Is it me, or does Harry's solution to this dilemma seem rather... half-assed? Ignoring potential the loss of effectiveness from his resolving to suddenly switch directions the first time things get bad, is he really going to know the first time someone dies as a result of his war? How will he know the difference? He's already gotten someone killed by his actions (Rita Skeeter, who he doesn't even know about) and another person gravely injured (that auror hurt by the rocket, who he doesn't know about but admittedly he thought the whole affair was a mistake afterward anyways). How about opportunity costs, the fact that if you handed me 100000 galleons demanding I save at least 10 lives with it I could hand you back 99000 in change. And that's before the "war" even "started"; hostilities are going to get more open and more direct from here. It's madness to think you can finish war, even a weird semi-geurella war like this, with zero casualties, or that you'll know about every one.

With the condition he gave himself anyone should be able to see that "failure" is a foregone conclusion. And there's very good odds he's not going to learn that what he's doing isn't working until he's racked up a far worse bodycount than one.

Morally he still deliberately ruined her, regardless of whether he thought it would cause her death. Doing something to ruin the reputation of someone who lives by their reputation is morally bad even if you didn't think through all the consequences.

Morally he still deliberately fucked her, regardless of whether he thought it would cause her death.

Different language would be more appropriate to the context. Not because I have qualms with foul language, but because I actually got the impression that we were considering rape-ethics or philosophy in magic-mediated edge cases till I followed the link.

Morally he didn't do it, and maybe Quirrel even had a desire to kill her sitting on a back burner before Harry got involved, but her death was caused by her interaction with Harry. It is no stretch to say that there is at least one hypothetical sequence of actions Harry could have taken, even given knowledge at the time (not realizing she worked for Lucius or was an animagus) which would not have resulted in her death. Heck, doing nothing would have resulted in her not death.

That is the level of challenge Harry is taking upon himself. Not just to not kill anyone, not just to keep your hands clean, not just to save people when he can. He's declaring that if any innocent person anywhere dies and there's something he could have done differently to save them, that's his failure condition. You can't do that.

That said, I thought about it a few minutes more and it could be his resolution is really about knowing he doesn't know how bad the situation is. It's certainly possible to get through, say, a political power struggle with someone like Lord Malfoy without anyone getting killed. Harry considers it possible but doesn't yet believe that his opponent is Voldemort. If his opponent is Voldemort avoiding casualties is impossible. If his opponent is someone less evil (though still pretty nasty), and the scope of the conflict is much smaller, he might be able to pull it off.

It seems that he promised himself to stop trying to save everyone even if a minor character dies accidentally. In that case it wouldn't matter if he considered himself directly responsible for the death of Rita Skeeter.

You can't do that.

Indeed. I don't see how he could manage not to compromise his 'every human life is precious' principle in a war. He's hesitating between two possible courses of action -- doing the math or playing Ghandi -- and neither seems like a satisfying choice. He really needs to become omnipotent or at least avoid the necessity of making such a choice.

Our time zones are different (hence you might have written me in the middle of my writing), but I think I reached my goal: thank you for your help. I'm still struggling a little bit with the interface.

Your probabilities seem way too low to me. Just one chance in 10 that because of the vow he'll be forced to kill the one we have many evidence to believe he's the arch-enemy ? Can you elaborate the reasons why you put such a low probability to that ?

Yes, of course. First of all, I just updated it to 0.15-0.20. This might actually be a bit high, but I've set it higher than what I feel is right due to my bias (consisting of Eliezer finding a more interesting way of writing the story).

It is "so low" due to the following:

a) I believe that Quirrel is not seeking a physical confrontation with Harry (earlier we saw him toss Harry a knut (that could have been a portkey to a volcano))

a.1.) Harry wouldn't win such a confrontation (a sneak attack would of course be much more likely to get the job done)

a.2.) If there is a confrontation and if that confrontation ends with the death of Quirrel, I expect the wands or Lily's ritual to be the deciding factor, not any action of Harry's.

b) I consider it most probable that Quirrel tries to turn Harry to his ways (0.6 < p < 0.5)

b.1) Harry might try to counter-turn Quirrel. I do doubt though that this will end with one of them dying. Killing one another seems so irrational...

Thanks, I think part of my surprise was from a different understanding of "he'll feel forced to kill Quirrel", to me that means "he'll take the decision of trying to kill Quirrel, using whatever indirect plan, surprise, henchmen, ... in the process", not just a one-to-one fight in which Harry kills Quirrel (like the way he kills Voldemort in the cannon). I agree the probability of such one-to-one fight is quite low.

I feel pretty confident that he won't directly kill Dumbledore (also I feel that Dumbledore is innocent, which influences my belief that Harry won't kill him).

I think he'll do something based on his belief that Dumbledore is evil, and that his action will be stupid and put Dumbledore or some other people into danger, probably in danger from Quirrell. That's a standard module in these kind of stories.

It might be useful to put a notice at the bottom of the chapter about new entries taking a while. All previous chapters have a similar note about the next update, and the lack of one on this chapter may imply the ending of the fic to some (especially those that don't read the discussions).

Well either being superman is possible, and he CAN save everyone, or it's not and he can't. Once he fails to save someone, it's clear he's not living in a world where he can save everyone. Once you're in a world where it's impossible to save everyone, trying to be superman is now a decision that's off the table.